It’s been a while since I posted something here so I will rekindle my passion with gamebooks by reviewing with one of my favorites from my childhood: Starship Traveller! A while ago I decided to replay this book. I was on a trip to Sintra, Portugal, during my vacation. I took the book along to play together with my girlfriend during the train ride (you can read all about that trip here).

The Story

This book is an impressive and original work. Up until this book, the Fighting Fantasy collection was always about swords & magic, dungeons, monsters, evil wizards/warriors. Startship Traveller is an unexpected turn into science fiction and space fantasy. In this book you are the Captain of a Spaceship, the Traveller. You start by being sucked into a wormhole and ending up in an unknown place in space. From here on your task is to find a way home for you and your crew.read more

Scorpion Swamp is one of my favorite Fighting Fantasy books. Its format is quite different from all the others released before it, since those progressed in a linear fashion and this one offered non-linear gameplay.

In Scorpion Swamp you actually can go back from where you came from (and have to do so to actually finish the book).

Other major aspect of this book is that there’s not only one quest to finish, but at the start of the book you’re allowed to choose one from three quests. All three are pretty easy to finish once you’ve made a map of the swamp and the book actually encourages you to do so.read more

Well, three versions of the second Destiny Quest book, apparently entitled “The Heart of Fire” have shown up on Amazon

All three are going to be published by Gollancz (which I know better for their sci-fi section :)) with the book seemingly making its first showing in paperback and hardback editions in September 2012, followed by a smaller format mass market edition in 2013.

Lets hope one year is enough for vredens to finish the maps for the 1st book’s 3rd quest. 😀

I have recently updated the destiny quest maps for The Legion of Shadow book. There were some errors which none of my proof readers detected but fortunately someone at the Destiny Quest Forums did! Thank you Epsilon.

I’m still missing the Act III because I haven’t actually finished this act and I don’t want any spoilers.

I decided I wanted to finish my gear optimizer for Destiny Quest (think Rawr! for World of Warcraft) before continuing much further.

Also missing are the city quests in act II. But both the Arena and the Robbers are pretty straightforward quests so I don’t think there’s much to think about when you do them. I left this for later development. There might also be some professions missing which leads me to two extra types of map nodes:read more

The thing about most gamebooks is that in order to play them you’ll likely need a pencil, paper, an eraser and… dice. Some books, like the new editions of the Fighting Fantasy series have dice roll results printed in their pages so you can open the book randomly and use them when a throw is needed. Still, throwing dice is more fun and some people (like me :p) actually like to collect them.

If you’re starting your collection or simply want lots of different dice without paying much for them, you have the option of acquiring a Chessex Pound O’ Dice. This is a bag of assorted dice. According to the official description, the bag comes with about 100 dice (6, 8, 10, 12, 20 & 30-sided) and all are factory seconds (dice with small defects). In addition, inside the bag there’s an envelope with a complete polyhedral speckled dice set, which only can be acquired with these bags.read more